Life of the Mind Interrupted: Essays on Mental Health and Disability in Higher Education - Paperback

Survival should not require silence.

Higher education promises that the mind is sovereign: that if you can think, you belong. But for millions of neurodivergent and mentally ill people in the academy, that promise comes with an unspoken condition: your mind must be the right kind of different.

Life of the Mind Interrupted is Katie Rose Pryal's account of what it costs to hide a psychiatric disability in the academy, and what it means, personally, and politically, to stop hiding. A bipolar-autistic professor and long-time columnist for The Chronicle of Higher Education, Pryal spent a decade in higher education with her diagnosis locked in silence.

These essays move from the intimate to the systemic: from the particular terror of a student calling you "emotionally erratic," to the structural failures that make disclosure of neurodiversity feel impossible. Pryal examines how race, gender, and job security shape whose disability gets accommodated and whose gets punished.

Pryal writes with the literary precision of someone who can name the systems and has been caught inside them.

For students, faculty, and anyone who has ever had to perform normalcy in a professional setting, Life of the Mind Interrupted names what so many know but haven't been able to say: that the academy was not built for brains like ours, and that it can, and must, do better.